It's a big week ahead for Apple fans, with the company launching the next major versions of iOS, watchOS, and more later today, plus the arrival of the iPhone XS/XS Max and Apple Watch Series 4 in a few days time. It's also a big week for MacStories, with coverage planned for many exciting app updates and the publishing of Federico's iOS 12 review.
Over the last few years, Federico's annual iOS review has grown into the center-point of our September Apple coverage, and as such we always enjoy providing a variety of extras to accompany the review. Here's what we have in store for this year.

<p>As the holiday shopping season approaches, voice-powered smart speakers are again expected to be big sellers, adding to the approximately one-quarter to one-third of the U.S. population that already owns a smart speaker and uses a voice assistant at least once a month.

Voice interfaces have been adopted faster than nearly any other technology in history. And with big sales has come big hype, thanks in part to breathless prognostications about our voice-driven future:

The global number of installed smart speakers is going to more than double to 225m units in two years, says Canalys.<br />• Voice shopping on Alexa alone could generate more than $5bn per year in revenue by 2020, according to RBC Capital Markets.<br />• Global ad spending on voice assistants — currently nonexistent — will reach $19bn by 2022, nearly the size of the current magazine ad business, per Juniper Research.

While some of this will likely come to pass, the hype might be disguising where we really are with voice technology: earlier than we think.

About a third of smart speaker owners end up using them less after the first month, according to an NPR and Edison Research report earlier this year. Just a little more than half said they wouldn’t want to go back to life without a smart speaker.

While people are certainly enthusiastic about the new technology, it’s not exactly life-changing yet.

Today, voice assistants and smart speakers have proven to be popular ways to turn on the radio or dim the lights or get weather information. But to be revolutionary, they will need to find a greater calling — a new, breakout application.</p>

Turns out that "radio" is a big new category here: podcasts or radio stations. And that's where adverts come in: people don't bother to ask their device to skip forward 30 seconds past an ad. Easier to let it play. "Smart speaker listeners are much more passive," in the words of one analyst.